The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti – France and the United States – combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

By indignities men come to dignities.

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Character is destiny.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.